Re-evaluating the Sixteenth Century Romanian Psalters. Aligned Corpus and Comparative Studies

Research project: roPSALT

Start date: 4 January 2021 | End date: 31 December 2023

Funded under  PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-2939 | UEFISCDI

Host institution

“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași | UAIC
Institute of Interdisciplinary Research
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Department

Area

Philology and palaeography | Computer science
Cultural Studies, cultural identities and memories, cultural heritage

Summary and Aims

The sixteenth century Romanian Psalters are among the oldest texts written in Romanian. There is no consensus in the academic literature on their translation initiative, which was attributed to Orthodox, Hussites, Catholics or Reformers. However, it is generally acknowledged that the prototype translation, from a Church Slavonic source yet unidentified, underwent multiple revisions following different sources, resulting in related versions, of which four manuscripts and three printed texts from the sixteenth century survived; some of them are bilingual (Slavonic-Romanian). The difficulty of establishing their precise source(s) came from the fact that the Church Slavonic Psalter has a complicated and incompletely explored textual tradition. Moreover, other scholars advanced a Latin or even a Hungarian source hypothesis, but these perspectives need further investigation.
While the oldest Romanian Psalters have been studied for more than a century, their translation process, sources, relations and reception are not entirely clarified. The lack of a tool facilitating their comprehensive linguistic comparison and a Bible-philology related analysis, the fragmental knowledge about the sources and the lack of modern philological editions are among the causes of this state-of-the-art. Seeking to fill this research gap, roPSALT will a) create a digitally aligned (at verse level) corpus of the sixteenth-century Romanian Psalters, b) compare and emphasize their translation practices and relations with the sources and between them, c) assess the context of their appearance.